43 people. While with the Chicago Tribune, he co-wrote a
series on the death penalty that helped drive the governor
of Illinois to suspend executions in the state and clear death
row entirely. At the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia,
he investigated the death of a rookie police officer during a
sting operation. His reports forced the firing of the police
chief and a sergeant and demotions or other disciplining of
eight officers.

For his efforts, Armstrong has won or shared in three
Pulitzer Prize awards (2010, 2012, and 2015) and has been a
finalist four other times. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award
for best fact crime book with Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of
College Football, Crime, and Complicity, written with Nick
Perry, and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in
Journalism from Columbia University. He has also served
as a visiting professor at Princeton and as a Nieman Fellow
at Harvard.

If not for an early career rewrite, Armstrong would have
worked in a courtroom rather than a newsroom. At Purdue,
he began as a computer science major before jumping to
political science as a route to law school. He spent a year
at the University of Chicago Law School and gained the
requisite debt, then experienced the revelation that he
didn’t want to be a lawyer.

merican journalism is in a crisis. The proliferationof cheap news outlets has left the traditionalmembers of the Fourth Estate slashing staffand/or ideals to stay in business. Newspapers, onceheralded as a pivotal element in checking and balancingthe government, are cutting frequency or just shuttingdown, unable to convert enough information into cash tostay in the fight.

Amid this shaky landscape is investigative journalist
Ken Armstrong (BA 1985, Political Science), a thorough
storyteller who is unbowed by the current clickbait, listicle
era. His gritty checking and balancing of the American
criminal justice system has made him a Pulitzer regular,
but, more importantly, it has changed a significant number
of minds.

“Sometimes a story leads to reforms years later, andsometimes the impact of a story—this is particularly trueof morality tales—escapes easy measure,” says Armstrong.“With some stories, success lies in challenging assumptionsrather than changing laws. If people make better decisionsgoing forward, that’s success.”Armstrong’s portfolio is filled with examples ofhis impact: at The Seattle Times, he helped uncovergovernmental mistakes that led to a landslide that killedA